Psychologists working in the area of social cognition have suggested that much of human understanding and behavior is guided by cognitive scripts. Scripts are defined as learned schematic conceptions of behavioral situations. The main goal of the proposed research is to investigate the effects of imagining particular behavioral scripts or scenarios on subsequent behavioral expectations and actual behaviors. More specifically, it is proposed that imagining oneself performing a specified target behavior (that is, creating a self-referent behavioral script) increases one's subjective expectancy to perform that behavior, and increases the probability of actually performing that behavior. The proposed research will also investigate a number of variables that should influence this phenomenon. These include imagination frequency and duration (increasing either should increase the imagination effect); plausibility of the imagined scenarios (the more plausible scenarios should lead to stronger imagination effects); imagined consequences of the scenario behavior (positive consequences should lead to more of an imagination effect than negative consequences); main character imagined in the scenarios (self-expectancies should show the imagination effect only when subjects imagine themselves as the main character); and scenario coherence (the imagination effect should occur most strongly when the scenario scenes are imagined in their logical sequence). Two different imagination experiments will be conducted. In the first, subjects will be given written descriptions of the first and last scene of the appropriate scenarios, with instructions to imagine each whole scenario and to sketch it in a 5 scene-panel format. In the second, each scene in the scenario will be presented on slides for the subject to imagine. Each slide will be a brief written description of the scene to be imagined. In both experiments, measures of subjective expectancies for the relevant target behaviors will be obtained. In Experiment 2, behavioral measures will also be obtained. The long term goals include discovering how behavioral scripts influence expectoncies and behaviors, how such scripts are developed, and how such scriptal processes can be used to modify maladaptive behaviors and substitute more adaptive ones in both clinical and non-clinical settings.